Yahoo! - A bit of respect please

It would seem the Tech Blogosphere has turned its venom from Sarah Palin to Yahoo, Techmeme today is busy crucifying them - here is TechCrunch for example:

....Yahoo’s share price has eroded another $13, destroying $18 billion in shareholder value

Except that most of Yahoo’s top managers have left the company.

What are they left with? A CEO that still can’t clearly state the core goals. Yang, slouched on stage and devoid of energy, alternated between calling Yahoo a platform company and a destination site. But he also said that Yahoo intends to remain competitive with Google in search, despite the vast differences in resources that the two companies can put towards research.

The nadir to me was when I read some 20-something PR type on Twitter chirp that "I have never respected Jerry Yang". Thats Mr Yang to you until you create your first $bn company, kiddo

Lest we forget:

- Yahoo's share price has gone down - but, in case Mr Arrington didn't notice, so has the entire global economy. In fact, in the last 3 months Yahoo and Google have dropped exactly the same amount - 30% - and in line with the NASDAQ.

- Getting some of the peanut butter out is critical to starting to turn a company around

- What are they left with - well apart from Jerry Yang, they still have a company with the some of the biggest online assets on the planet, revenues of $7.3 bn pa, cashflow of c $1.3bn, and c $3.2bn in cash. And they've only been going for a bit more than 13 years

- They have got out of a Google deal which would probably have drawn them into a resource consuming anti-trust suit

I actually think that's quite respectable, despite being anti the blogo-zeitgeist.

Many are calling for Mr Yang's head, others want to kick his *rse. Perhaps, but really - a company with Yahoo's assets is far from being the walking corpse the blogosphere portrays it as.

Jus' Sayin', as they say - I wouldn't write (or blog) them off just yet.

Update - thank heavens someon else is also calling the blogosphere out on this - Kara Swisher weighs in over here: